Pages

A new University of Chicago Crime Lab study shows that it's four times more likely for people convicted of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon to be re-arrested for murder. Those offenders were also almost nine times more likely to be arrested again for nonlethal shootings, the study found.

Sources

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plan to move forward with the three-year phaseout of the city's 55 percent health care subsidy for 30,000 retired city workers and their dependents means retirees will have to pay more out-of-pocket costs in 2014.

Sources

A
Chicago program that works to provide free mammograms to uninsured
women may be at risk of being privatized or closed following the state's
decision to terminate the city health department's grant funding for
the effort over alleged mismanagement and quality of care
concerns.

During a Thursday press conference at City Hall, a
number of Chicago's African-American alderwomen, breast health
advocates and unionized workers said it's crucial for the city to invest
in the program in order to keep the program running and operated in-house.

Officials
with the Public Health Organization, which has members who are patients and workers of the city’s Breast
Health Program, said the city should continue funding the program while
it invests in correcting the mismanagement and quality of care issues, which prompted the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) to pull the $296,000 in Illinois Breast and Cervical Cancer Program funds back in April.

The city's Breast Health Program program serves thousands of women each year, and it is specifically focused on working to reduce
the breast cancer mortality rate among African-American women in
Chicago, a rate that is 62 percent higher than white women in the city. The health
advocates at Thursday's gathering said they are particularly worried that if the Breast Health
Program ends, four mammography sites located in low-income, minority communities would close.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he will move forward with his plan to phaseout the city's 55 percent health care subsidy for 30,000 retired city of Chicago employees and their dependents starting in 2014.

Albany
Park students and parents who gathered for an education meeting late last week want their local aldermen to publicly oppose the Chicago
Public Schools' (CPS) plan to expand charter schools on the Northwest
Side.

The more than 50 residents at the meeting, held at Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church,
said they plan to visit the offices of Northwest Side Alds. Deb Mell
(33rd), Rey Colon (35th) and Margaret Laurino (39th) this week to urge them to sign a pledge to support neighborhood school investments and
speak out against new charters in the area.

CPS issued a request for proposals (RFP)
in mid-August for new charters in a number of "priority
communities", primarily on the Northwest and Southwest Sides, as a means
to help alleviate neighborhood school overcrowding. The charters
are slated to open in the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years.

Those
at the meeting said it's unacceptable that CPS released the RFP at a
time when Albany Park neighborhood schools are grappling with more than
$5 million in budget cuts.

"These budget cuts left us with huge
high school fees, not enough teachers or books for our classes, and our
neighborhood schools are struggling to give us [an] education we
deserve, but still, the mayor wants to open new charter schools," said
Jamie Adams, a Roosevelt High School sophomore and leader with Chicago
Students Organizing to Save our Schools (CSOSS).

Chicago
Public Housing activists say it is unacceptable that the Chicago
Housing Authority (CHA) has once again broken its promise to deliver
replacement housing units for former residents of the now demolished
Harold Ickes Homes, which saw its last families move out in 2010.

The
Ickes public housing buildings on the near South Side had more than
1,000 units before they were torn down between 2009 to 2010. CHA has
yet to bring back 312 replacement units that it promised to construct,
and it appears there are no concrete plans to build any of them in 2014,
according to CHA's proposed 2014 Moving to Work (MTW) Annual Plan.

On
Thursday, more than a dozen former Ickes residents and their supporters
gathered at a vacant lot at State Street and Cermak Road, one of the
former Ickes sites.

"It is unfortuante that every time
that housing numbers were supposed to be promised, those numbers were
reduced," said the Rev. Robert Jones of Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church. "The
city talks about the economics, but yet money is found to put a
tremendously large DePaul center not very far from here, and yet we
still have this vacant field."